Everything Everywhere 4G event on eve of iPhone 5 reveal

A 4G launch event will be held by Everything Everywhere at The Science Museum in London on Tuesday 11th September. Ofcom granted permission to Everything Everywhere to launch a 4G service starting from 11th September at the earliest, so even though the invite doesn’t actually say anything about 4G we are pretty sure that is what it is all about.

The invite reads; “Brand New. Please join Everything Everywhere on Tuesday 11th September 2012. 9am start at The Science Museum.” Inside the invite says “information on our new brand and the latest innovation in network technology” will be revealed at the event. So a new brand will be formed by Orange and T-Mobile to promote the 4G services using Everything Everywhere’s 1800MHz spectrum.

Dates are a coincidence?

Current 4G devices in other countries work mainly on the LTE bands of 2.6GHz and 800MHz (Apple’s newest LTE enabled iPad uses LTE700 in the US). Also the new 4G network, though it will probably be announced Tuesday, is unlikely to go live for another month or so. It looks therefore like the neighbouring dates of Everything Everywhere’s 4G launch and the Apple iPhone 5 (suspected to be 4G LTE enabled) is a mere coincidence.

However when Everything Everywhere do launch the network they will need some compatible devices to flog to use it. As Thomas Wehmeier, at Informa Telecoms, said to PCPro a couple of weeks ago “You can build a network but without devices people won't come. For a successful launch you need to have smartphones - it's critical. Everything Everywhere will launch with some devices, but it would be much happier if it could have the real flagship devices.” He added that “Everything Everywhere alone isn't big enough to convince Apple to include 1,800MHz, but the Korean operators want that frequency, Telstra down in Australia is desperate to have it,” which could sway Apple into implementing it. Pocket Lint also think so. The current Android flagship phone the Samsung Galaxy S III isn’t compatible with 1800MHz LTE. Though the previous Galaxy S II model is, it's not such a hot property for grabbing headlines right now.

It beats Something Something UK, launching a brand isn't cheap, seems like a clever/crafty/sh@tty way to prevent orange and t mobile customers acessing the lte network, especially in the early days when the cells maybe larger whilst transmitters are still being rolled out.Orange/t mobile customer services can just say "oh no you can't use theirs, they're a seperate company. Eventually when 4g isn't classed aspremium they'll rebrand the whole company as EE or realise the name is sh@t and come up with a new one, probably Something Something UK!

Right now EE are just the parent company for T-Mobile UK and Orange UK. Over the past couple of years they have been combining back office operations as well as the networks, to the extent that I really never know if I'm connected to “Orange” or “T-Mobile”. I hope they will eventually get to the stage that the actual network is Everything Everywhere and the two brands are virtual networks running on top (like Tesco does with O2). Network coverage will be fantastic at that point.

EE also stated they will be launching a third brand in the UK later in the year. I wonder if this is it? Perhaps this third brand isn't a new network (they didn't say it was going to be, they said it was a “brand”), but their name for their 4G network which will be available to both T-Mobile and Orange customers on a 4G plan. Of course 4G is going to be a premium service, it's a premium product.

Perhaps instead of choosing to save one of the existing brands and ditch the other, they have decided to go with a brand new one (it won't be EE, that is the parent group) that will eventually mean they don't need the older two and they both disappear.